I am pleased to announce that we have worked up a Grails plugin for Hudson. Hudson is a really slick continuous integration server. Check out their site for more info on the engine itself.

It has always been possible to build Grails apps from Hudson but in the past this has involved writing shell scripts that are triggered by Hudson. This works but is not the slickest solution. What you really want is for the CI server to have knowledge of the fact that the project you are building is a Grails app and that knowledge will allow the tool to be more efficient about carrying out the build and also allow the CI server to provide Grails specific options for the build. This is where the new Grails plugin is heading.

Right now the plugin is very basic. In the system configuration screen you may configure as many Grails installations as you like. This is useful for situations where the same CI server may be building multiple projects with different version of Grails or maybe even building multiple copies of the same project with multiple versions of Grails. Below is a screenshot of the system configuration screen:

Notice that there is built in validation to make sure you have entered a valid path to your Grails installation.

When configuring a project in Hudson you have a lot of options for what should happen at build time. The Grails plugin adds a "Build With Grails" option and if that option is selected you can select from a list of common build targets to execute as well as type in any arbitrary targets you may want to execute. This is useful for executing Grails commands that are not in the list of checkboxes and for executing your own custom Grail scripts that may be part of your project. Below is a screenshot of the project configuration screen:

The first version of the plugin has not been released yet but will be soon. In the meantime, I would be happy to hear what kinds of capabilities you would like to see the plugin provide. Even in its current very basic state, the plugin is very useful as it makes configuring a Grails project in Hudson drop dead simple.

I have created the St. Louis Dynamic Language Interest Group at LinkedIn. If you have a special interest in dynamic languages and are in the St. Louis area or are close enough to the St. Louis area that you would like to be involved with the group, please take a minute to visit the group at LinkedIn and join us.

More information is coming regarding the goals of the group and what sorts of activities we may engage in. I want to give the group some time to populate before moving forward with those details.

If you have any questions about the group in the meantime, please don't hesitate to let me know.

The new Grails Mail Plugin is really slick stuff. Very little effort has gone in to the thing so far and there is more to come but even in its current state this is really nice. More details are available at http://grails.org/Mail+Plugin but basically you get a method called 'sendMail' added to your controllers (or you could use an autowired mailService) that accepts a closure and the contents of the closure express the details of the message being sent. A simple example looks like this...

Take a look at the docs for more information. This is good stuff already. I think the simplicity of sending a message like this is pretty impressive but more impressive is how easy it is to build support for something like that in a dynamic language like Groovy. More and more folks are taking advantage of the Grails Plugin System to easily add capabilities like this to their web apps.